They don’t have journalism degrees, Carter Rycroft or Nolan Thiessen. They’ve never worked for a newspaper or for any other media outlet.

But they think they know a story when they see one.

And they expect to see one in their hotel room mirrors every morning here.

“My feeling is that this has the potential to be a very neat story for a long time to come,” said Rycroft of the 10 days ahead at the World Curling Championship.

“If you think of all the factors that play into it, I think we have a chance to write a super sports story. From what Pat Simmons did at skip at the Brier, the change with John Morris moving down from skip, all the underlying stories from what happened to us at worlds last year with the team breaking up and everything, it has all the makings of a very special story in Canadian sports,” he added.

“It’s crazy. It’s already an amazing story. I don’t think another Brier will likely ever have that story,” said Thiessen of what happened three weeks ago in Calgary.

Last year, Rycroft and Thiessen won the Brier in Kamloops along with third Pat Simmons and skip Kevin Koe. Then Koe dumped them, deciding to replace them with Marc Kennedy and Ben Herbert from retired Kevin Martin’s team and Brent Laing from Glenn Howard’s fading foursome to create a better team to take forward to the next Olympic quadrennial.

One problem. Koe still had to go to Beijing with these three guys and try to play together one last time wearing the maple leaf for Canada at the world championship in Beijing.

They were a double dog disaster.

Indeed, they became the only Canadian team in history to play three playoff games at the worlds and lose them all.

It was only the third time in the last 30 years Canada didn’t come home with a medal.

“You know, the night after winning the Brier in Calgary and for the next few days we started to talk about it. And it’s pretty cool, I think,” said Thiessen of the story they’ve authored and the ending they might now write.

“On the plane coming home from Beijing, you look at each other and never know if you’re going to get another one of those chances. It really sucked that we gave up another opportunity there in China so it’s pretty cool we get another chance to hopefully write a different ending.

“It’s definitely exciting and it really adds to it, I think, that we have such sour tastes in our mouths the way we played in Beijing and being on the losing end of all those playoff games.”

Three weeks ago in Calgary, the trio, with John Morris replacing Koe, despite playing an abbreviated schedule and only qualifying for the playoffs in one event and finishing fifth in that, went and won the Brier again.

And as is the team history, they did it the hard way.

“I can’t believe that just happened,” said Thiessen moments after Simmons drew the button in the 11th end to win 6-5 over Olympic gold-medal winner Brad Jacobs and make the two front-end curlers the 29th and 30th to win three Briers.

“We were 2-3. We changed our skip. And we just won the Brier! I can’t believe that happened. We put a rock on the button in the 11th end to win the Brier. It’s every front-enders dream,” he said of Simmons taking over from Morris in the only mid-Brier switch of skips in history and going 8-1 the rest of the way.

Flash forward to Thursday, where the team held two practices at CFB Halifax to prepare for Saturday’s world championship opener against John Shuster of the USA.

Rycroft can see a completely different script to how this one ends compared to the worlds last year.

“From the venue, to it being Canada and Halifax, to the dynamics of our team at this moment, it’s entirely the opposite. We are on a team that’s on the way up compared to a team being on the way to being out or done or whatever you want to call it.

“I would say everything feels completely different than it felt like last year. It’s night and day different from going into the worlds last year and going into this one.

“Forget the rest of the teams that are here. The favorites are probably the same teams as last year. I don’t think any of that has changed. We are what has changed. Just about everything involving us has changed.”

Rycroft was in a different space than Thiessen and Simmons. He’d let it be known he intended to take this year off.

“My goal was to win the world championship and be content. There might have been more on Nolan’s and Pat’s minds and on Kevin’s mind considering the circumstances,” said Rycroft.

“Part of you says ‘Things change and it happens all the time in curling’ and part of you says ‘If a guy doesn’t want to curl with you anymore, a guy doesn’t want to curl with you anymore.’ What I found tough was the perception that ‘Well, those guys are done, they’re not good anymore and that’s why he’s changing his team to have a new super team’,” said Thiessen.

“We didn’t see ourselves like that and I think the Brier win kind of justifies our view of ourselves. We’re pretty good players, too. You can’t shake a stick at three Brier titles. I think that gave us a little more motivation, maybe, to show the public that we weren’t cast-offs and afterthoughts. There’s some validation there for us.”

They’d been there before. They’d been world champions.

Four years earlier in Cortina-d’Ampezzo, Italy, with Blake MacDonald at third, the team went 9-2 to finish second to Norway in the round robin but absolutely dominated in the playoffs, clobbering Norway 11-5 in the 1-2 game and 9-3 in the gold-medal game. Koe, MacDonald and Rycroft all curled 95% in the final.

This was a horror story.

“The one in Italy was a really small rink. It was 1,000 people in a 2,000-seat arena. But Beijing was a 17,000-seat arena and there were 75 people in the stands. It didn’t have the same feel that it will hopefully have here,” said Thiessen.

“Overseas in China I think our team handled a lot of the culture change very well over there. There were a lot of things going against us and we just didn’t find a way to fight through it,” he added.

“We had all that stuff with the team coming to an end that came out before we went there. As much as you could think that you could be professional and you can put that behind you, there was maybe more to it than you could accept,” said Rycroft.

“But having it in China had more to do with what happened than the team stuff from my point of view. We were northern Alberta boys going to a smog-filled city where I had a sore throat from 10 minutes after I landed there until I came home.

“The ice conditions are hard to describe to people. For the first half of the week, we had water that wouldn’t freeze because it had petroleum products in it. It was unbelievable.

“Any stories you may have heard of them having to go and import a bunch of water, that’s all true. They were in big trouble. Whatever they used as containers to bring the water in had been used to contain petroleum products before and when you went to freeze it, the petroleum would rise to the top and parts of it would freeze and other parts of it wouldn’t.

“I can remember them going down the ice with a scraper and it was literally waves of water. It was bad.

“The ice makers did their best, but it’s a country that isn’t real good at making fast decisions and changing things because that’s the way they work. You have to have seven meetings to turn a light on. So that was the start of it,” said the second, who won an Olympic silver medal with Kevin Martin in Salt Lake 2002.

“The ice wasn’t great even late in the week but by the end of the week we should have had that figured out,” said Thiessen.

You could make the case that the situation affected Koe more than the three guys he was dumping.

“I can’t speak for him. He won’t say too much. But he definitely looked a little mentally worn out with everything,” said Thiessen.

“The news getting out before we got on the plane and having to do denials and stuff probably affected him a little bit. We were hoping it would be a swan song thing and it definitely didn’t work out that way.”